Unexploded is Alison MacLeod's compelling novel of love and prejudice in wartime Brighton.
LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2013.
May, 1940. On Park Crescent, Geoffrey and Evelyn Beaumont and their eight-year-old son, Philip, anxiously await news of the expected enemy landing on the beaches of Brighton.
It is a year of tension and change. Geoffrey becomes Superintendent of the enemy alien camp at the far reaches of town, while Philip is gripped by the rumour that Hitler will make Brighton's Royal Pavilion his English HQ. As the rumours continue to fly and the days tick on, Evelyn struggles to fall in with the war effort and the constraints of her role in life, and her thoughts become tinged with a mounting, indefinable desperation.
Then she meets Otto Gottlieb, a 'degenerate' German-Jewish painter and prisoner in her husband's internment camp. As Europe crumbles, Evelyn's and Otto's mutual distrust slowly begins to change into something else, which will shatter the structures on which her life, her family and her community rest. Love collides with fear, the power of art with the forces of war, and the lives of Evelyn, Otto and Geoffrey are changed irrevocably.
Praise for Alison MacLeod:
'Unexploded is an unforgettable book. With exquisitely researched and rendered detail, the author plunges us into the panic and paranoia of war, fusing international politics, national politics and family politics in her powerful study of hypocrisy, oppression, cultural misunderstanding and desire' Bidisha
'Alison MacLeod is a strikingly original voice. Her stories create intimate worlds and make the reader live in them with an intensity which is haunting, disturbing and above all beguiling' Helen Dunmore
'MacLeod's range - spanning the movingly real to the mysteriously surreal - is excitingly, imaginatively realised and unified in awareness of the dark menace of love's uncertainty' Metro
Alison MacLeod was raised in Canada and has lived in England since 1987. She is the author of three novels, The Changeling, The Wave Theory of Angels and Unexploded, and of a collection of stories, Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction. Unexploded was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2013. She is Professor of Contemporary Fiction at Chichester University and lives in Brighton.
The first thing I honestly felt when I finished the last sentence of this novel was frustration. On the one hand, I knew going into the book (and reinforced by the first chapter) that this was going to be a tense and bleak read. Unexploded is a slow read (perhaps even a little too slow), the drama unfolding sluggishly but tensions remaining high throughout. This coupled with the behaviours and norms of the society at the time (Evelyn’s middle/upper class upbringing, with what is said and left unsaid) adds to the growing conflict on the marital/character front.
Despite the Beaumonts being the product of their times and the added pressures that the war has brought on daily life, my frustration festered as the story trudged forward. The lack of communication and trust between Evelyn and Geoffrey was just too much–far more than I had anticipated after being introduced to their backstory–that it prolonged the inevitable blow-up. In many ways, this novel reminded me of Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room which was shortlisted in 2009 in the way in which the relationship fractured and fell apart (I use the word “relationship” instead of “marriage” because the outcomes in both novels were very different whereas the relationship fundamental to the marriage suffered in the same ways).
Overall, Unexploded can be thoughtful at times but also exhausting, the tension drawn out. I was left far too frustrated with all of the characters involved.
You can read this review in its entirety over at caffeinatedlife.net: http://www.caffeinatedlife.net/blog/2013/09/09/review-unexploded/
